Irritable Me

One of the most common symptoms of perimenopause is irritability. And I've had it in spades this past week. "It is very common for women to become more irritable, even downright angry, about things that were more easily overlooked before," writes Christiane Northrup in The Wisdom of Menopause. You can say that again. Or as Robert Earl Keen sings it, "It's the little things that piss me off."

Take the snafu at the computer store. After checking and double checking with the salesperson (and the store manager) that I was indeed buying the correct cable for my computer, and having brought the laptop into the store to show them the port for which I needed said cable, and again being assured that yes indeed I was being sold the correct cable, guess what? Yup. Wrong cable. Now this in and of itself might not have been so irritating but when you're counting on the cable to hook up the computer to a projector so you can make a presentation in front of a group of people, it adds a whole other level of irritability, and yes, anger.

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And things deteriorated after that. Bad service at a restaurant. A snarky sales clerk. It was as if the world was saying, "How can I irritate you? Let me count the ways."

Now I wondered, is it my personality? Or is there a biological reason why I feel like I could literally bite someone's head off? While mood swings and irritability could be the result of not sleeping or some of the other symptoms of perimenopause, science supports that these flash feelings of irritability are not just a personality flaw. One study showed that increased levels of the hormones FSH and LH during perimenopause correlated with feelings of outward hostility. So watch out world.